Did Monsanto just want more profits, or did it want to save
the world?

BY MICHAEL SPECTER

New Yorker 10 April 2000

Each fall, the environmental group Greenpeace holds a conference,
in an effort to make its priorities as clear to corporate executives
and investors as they are to its two and a half million members.
The gathering, at a London hotel, is a chance for one of the world's
most determined environmental organizations to remind skeptics
about its goals, and to let people know what it is wiuing to do
to achieve them. For its latest event, in October, the organizers
had scheduled appearances by the two principal antagonists in
one of the most unsettling issues of our age: the production and
use of genetically modified foods. No controversy-nuclear power,
global warming, or even the eerie possibility of cloning human
beings-occupies a larger space in that disturbing arena where
science, social values, and commerce collide. Lord Peter Melchett,
an organic farmer and a former Labour minister, who has led Greenpeace's
efforts to stop the use of biotechnology in agriculture, was enlisted
to debate Robert B. Shapiro, the chairman and C.E.O. of the intemational
conglomerate Monsanto, who is the technology'S chief evangelist.
It was a perfect moment for such a conversation: geneticafly modified
foods, with few labels to identify them, have become the most
widely adopted products in modern farming history. A decade ago,
no transgenic crops were commercially available anywhere on earth;
in 1995, four million acres had been planted; by 1999, that number
had grown to a hundred mUtion. In the United States, half of the
enormous soybean crop and more than a third of the corn are the
products of biotechnology. Shapiro believes that altering the
seeds of soybeans, beets, and cotton to resist herbicides is the
barest beginning of what he and many others consider a revolution
in agriculture, food, and, ultimately, human health. This new
science, he says, is the principal reason that "there now
exists an opportunity to create a genuine science of nutrition,
something that has never existed in human history." But,
where Monsanto sees unlimited promise, Greenpeace has found little
more than profit motive and peril. In Europe, and particularly
in the United Kingdom, opposition to agricultural biotechnology
has become almost a reli-gion-one endorsed vigorously by Prince
Charles. "I happen to beeeve that this kind of genetic modification
takes mankind into realms that belong to God, and to God alone,"
he has soa'd. Lord Melchett, for his part, will stand trial this
week for mowing down an experimental government crop of geneticaUy
modified maize, in Norfolk, not far from his estate. just a few
days before the conference, Shapiro called to say that he couldn't
make it. Instead, his image was beamed from America onto a video
screen. Shapiro appeared grim, defensive, and defeated. After
more than a year of protests, Europe was shutting Monsanto out
of its markets. So, for the most part, was Brazil. Two of Monsanto's
biggest competitors-the Swiss pharmaceutical giant Novartis and
the British drugmaker AstraZeneca-were about to combine their
agricultural divisions into one business and sell it, essentially
abandoning their involvement in crop biotechnology.japanese companies
had decided to stop using genetically altered products, and Mexico's
largest tortiuamaker had ended its reliance on modified corn.
Under pressure from Greenpeace, Novartis stopped using genemodified
soy and com in its Gerber brand of baby food. Heinz announced
it would do the same. By last fall, the tension in Europe had
spread to America. A highly publicized-though very preliminary-report
from a researcher at Cornell suggested that the eggs of monarch
butterflies (the great fluttering pandas of the insect world)
might not sum've on the pollen of modified corn. American farmers
began to fear that European ports would send their tankers fitu
of grain back to sea, and late last summer the world's most prominent
mine Archer Daniels Midland-instructed its confiised and disheartened
clients to segregate modified crops from all others and haul them
to market in separate containers. In November, the Food and Drug
Administration was set to begin its first fiiu series of hearings
on the use and safety of genetically altered foods. Shapiro's
faith in the technology remained absolute, though. He told the
Greenpeace audience that without biotechnology farmers would never
meet the world's rapidly growing demand for food. At the same
time, Shapiro was surprisingly contn'te, sounding like one of
those Chinese leaders who during the Cultural Revolution were
made to walk through the streets in a dunce cap. "Our confidence
in this technology and our enthusiasm for it has, I think, widely
been seen, and understandably so, as condescension or indeed arrogance,'
he said. "Because we thought it was our job to persuade,
too often we forgot to listen." Lord Melchett didn't know
how to respond, so he delivered his prepared remarks. He said
that Greenpeace was ready to join arms with Monsanto if only the
corporation would renounce its use of agricultural biotechnology
and embrace organic farming as the principal solution to the world's
crop needs. It was a bit like offering moral support to General
Motors, if only the automobile-maker would abandon the internal-combustion
engine1 in favor of the bicycle. At one point, Shapiro was asked
if he felt like a bully imposing unwanted foods upon the world.
"Well, if I'm a bully," he replied dryly, "I certainly
don't feel myself to be successful at it."

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The Monsanto Company, which was founded in St. Louis in 1901,
became one of the world's most successfiil chemical concerns,
starting out with products Eke saccharin, aspirin, acrylic, and
fertilizers, and eventually selling PCBs, plastics, dioxin, and
the defoliant Agent Orange. When Robert Shapiro took control of
the company, in 1995, it had more than twenty thousand employees
in dozens of countries. Shapiro quickly made it clear that he
intended to start over. Within three years, the company had spun
off its chemical operations and committed itself to biotechnology
and a cleaner world. Its new, officially stated goal was to help
people "lead longer, healthier lives, at costs that they
and their nations can afford and without continued environmental
degradation." Monsanto's herbicide Roundup has been one of
its best-selling products for more than twenty-five years. In
1996, the company introduced Roundup Ready seeds, which were engineered
to resist the herbicide, and the seeds have dominated every market
in which they are sold. Under Shapiro's direction, Monsanto established
marketing agreements with some of its largest competitors in the
seed business; in other cases, it simply bought the company. In
1996, Monsanto and DeKalb Genetics signed a contract to share
the licensing of corn and soybean seeds; the same year, Monsanto
bought Agracetus, a cotton-andplant biotechnology company. In
1997, Monsanto purchased the soybean company Asgrow Aeronomics
and Holdens Foundation Seeds. Monsanto also formed partnerships
with the 'ant grain com91 pany Cargiu and with Millennium Pharmaceuticals,
which specializes in genomics and gene-sequencing technology.
By last year, after an eight-bilhon-dollar spree, Monsanto had
made a greater commitment to producing genetically modified crops
than any other organization in the world. It seemed like a "qse
investment. Monsanto was not orily leading the race for new genetically
engineered foods but its stock price had doubled. Most analysts
on Wall Street predicted that the growth wotad continue. Shapiro,
who is sixty-one, had ambitions that extended far beyond selling
seed to farmers. When he took over the company, he had looked
at the four main strands of its business-agriculture, pharmaceuticals,
food, and chemicalsand decided that by abandoning chemicals he
could combine the other parts into one. More clearly than his
compel .itors, he understood that common foods could reduce cholesterol,
that fruits could be tumed into fife-saving vaccines, and that
genetics could improve the staples that millions rely on for daily
sustenance. A lawyer and a former urbanaffairs professor, Shapiro
had become the unlikely Johnny Appleseed of genetic modification,
promoting his vision of a world where there are not simply foods
and drugs but foods that take the place of drugs. "This is
an important moment in human history,' Shapiro told me the first
time we met, in Monsarito's offices at Chicago's Merchandise Mart.
"The application of contemporary biological knowledge to
issues Eke food and nutrition and human health has to occur. It
has to occur for the same reasons that things have occurred for
the past ten millennia. People want to live better, and they will
use the tools they have to do it. Biology is the best tool we
have." In some ways, the shift wasn't all that profound:
for centuries, farmers have been saving seeds and breeding them
over generations to make better plants. All the plants we eat
(corn, wheat, potatoes, rice) and many that we dor;t (orchids,
roses, Christmas trees) have been manipulated in an effort to
make them last longer, tower later, look better, taste sweeter,
or grow more vigorously in stubborn soil. (Cabbage, broccoli,
cauliflower, and kale, for example, afl come from the same wild
ancestor, although hundreds of years of breeding have turned them
into four entirely different foods.) In the nineteenth century,
Luther Burbank, America's first great plant breeder, spent his
life crossing the seedlings of plants in order to create hybrids
robust enough to thrive. Gregor Mendel's experiments with peas
started to change all that. He proved that there was a system
to inheritance. Some traits are more powerful than others, and
those always win out. But modern agriculture, modern medicine,
and the information society itself didn't really begin until 1953,
when James Watson and Francis Crick discovered the structure of
the DNA molecule, which carries the information that cells need
to build proteins, and to live. Today, it's as if scientists in
half the laboratories on earth spent their time cutting bits of
DNA from one cell and sphclng them into others. Nature maybe random,
but genetic modification allows plant breeders to be specific.
This type of manipulation has long been accepted in medicine,
largely because the risks seem well contained and the benefits
easy to understand. InsuEn produced since 1983, for example, has
been largely based on a synthetic gene that is a replica of one
found in humans. Yet playing with the molecular foundations of
the food supply has seemed to many people hke the agricultural
equivalent of cloning a lamb-it crosses some unacceptable boundary.
It is one thing to mix different varieties of potato or cassava,
but researchers have now advanced genetics to a point where they
have implanted specific genes from a fish that can swim comfortably
in the icy Atlantic into the cells of others that cannot, and
even, in experiments, into a strawberry, in order to help it ward
off a frost. For some people, that's taking science a step too
far. Even many of those who beeeve in biotechnology are plainly
afraid of it, especially in Europe, which has always been more
skeptical about genetic research than America. To critics, the
technology seemed to embody the worst excesses of American industry,
fancy gadgets that solve no problems. Worse than seeming gimmicky,
however, the tedinologywasusuaUyinvisible."If Monsanto had
spent a lot of money and produced an egg with no cholesterol,
I just don't think we would be having these problems today,"
Michael Lipton, an economist at the Poverty Research Unit of the
University of Sussex, told me. Lipton is an expert on nutrition,
farming, and demographics in the Third World, and believes that
genetically modified products will help feed the world. "I
always say that electricity is a fantastic invention," he
continued, "but if the first two products had been the electric
chair and the came prod, I doubt that most consumers would have
seen the point."

The fear and the hope surrounding biotechnology are very much
on display in Basel, a tidy, conservative city dominated by the
pharmaceutical company Novartis. Not long ago, I had lunch in
a company dining room there. A card was placed at every plate.
On one side there was a color picture of an ear of rich, golden
corn. On the back was a photograph of an ear of corn whose kernels
were mossy and white. This corn was infected with a particldarly
hideous mycotoxin fiingus, a disease that genetically modified
corn is engineered to prevent. "TEs maize-product you are
eating today is specially cooked for you and contains Bt corn
from Germany," the card said, referring to corn that had
been genetically modified with a bacterium, Bacillus thuringiensus.

"We should talk more about the real benefits of Bt corn
than of potential negative effects for tomorrow." The corn
tasted fine, and shortly after lunch I met with the Novartis chairman
and C.E.O., Daniel Vasella, a physician who is one of agricultural
biotechnology's most eloquent supporters and one of Switzerland's
most well-knovrn corporate leaders. Vasella is an open man with
an ever-present smile, but, when I asked him why he had decided
to stop using genetically modified ingredients in Gerber baby
food, he seemed tense. "We are not missionaries," Vasella
said. "We sell things. No company can prosper by telling
customers what is good for them." He went on, "This
is not just about plants. It's about our myths, our history and
culture. It's about what we put in our mouths and in our babies'
mouths. When you go to somebody's house, they offer you food.
That is a ritual of every life. What is more basi@ and what could
be more frllyhtenin@ than playing with that? Of course, it scares
people. How coidd something this important not scare people?"
Monsanto's success in altering the food supply had played into
this fear and reinforced an image that Shapiro has worked tirelessly
to shed, especially in Europe, where the company is seen as a
symbol of corporate imperialism. Supporters of genetically modified
agricul ture like to stress the technology's potential to address
hunger and disease, but Europeans are not hungry. What they initially
got were herbicides they didn't want and long-lasting tomatoes
they didr;t need. Nor did it help that in 1998 Monsanto had tried
to introduce its products to a continent stiff recovering from
the shock of mad-cow disease, when signs of opposition to novel
foods, and to science itself, were everywhere. To its opponents,
Monsanto has become a cauldron of evil-a place where people have
manipulated nature to create grotesque "frankenfoods,"
which they have shoved down millions of unsuspecting throats.
"This whole world view, that genetically modified food is
there so we have no choice but to use it, is absolutely terrifying,'
Lord Melchett told "And ' 's wrong. There is a filndame.
it i mental question here: Is progress really just about marching
forward? We say no. We say it is time to stop assuming that discoveries
only move us forward. The war against nature has to end. And we
are going to stop it."

Genetically modified plants have been around since the early
eighties. There was opposition from the start, but the movement
was never particldarly strong unto, on March 3, 1998, a patent
was issued jointly to the United States n Department of Agriculture
and to the Delta &Pine Land Company, of Scott, Mississippi,
America's biggest cottonseed producer. The patent's title "Control
of plant gene expression"-was too bland to draw much attention,
but Monsanto noticed. So did the Rural Advancement Foundation
International, an environmental organization, based in Canada,
that monitors the loss of genetic diversity. The patent presented
the best evidence yet that agricultural biotechnology could harness
and reroute the basic elements of life. lt also presented the
dangers of doing so, and crystallized, as nothing had before,
the deep emotions associated with this powerfid new tool. The
patent refers to a set of molecular "switches" that
can turn genes essential for reproduction on and off. The final
step is particularly ingenious: a plant is forced to make a toxic
protein that win sterilize its seeds after it is fiiuy grown.
In a brileant stroke of public relations, the Rural Advancement
Foundation Inter national called the new gene the Terminator,
after the robotic killer played by Arnold Schwarzenegger, and
sterileseed technology quickly became a potent symbol for how
genetically modified crops coLAd cause a break in nature. Worse
than that, such seeds could threaten more than a billion poor
people throughout the developing world, for whom saving harvested
seeds is essential. Commercial farmers in America and Europe,
by contrast, rely on hybrid seeds, whose vigor diminishes in every
generation; to get the best possible crop, farmers must buy new
seeds every year. For companies Eke Monsanto, the benefits seemed
obvious. The ability to shut off a seed at the end of the year
restricts its use, and permits a company to protect it as intellectual
property. Just as those cumbersome registration codes on computer
software are intended to make it impossible for friends to swap
copies of Microsoft Word or Lotus Notes, this would mean that
a buyer could use the altered seed only once. In addition, the
technology has the potential to address a worrisome environmental
issue: since such seeds can end a plant's life cycle, they may
insure that unwanted traits do not cross-pollinate and spread
to other species. The technology would also permit a producer
to load a variety of characteristics into a seed; corn, for example,
could have switches to fight drought or repel frost or kill a
pest, Eke the often devastating European com borer that appears
every few seasons. Depending on the crop, the season, and the
location of the fields, the technology could offer protection
from the sun, or help the seed absorb its rays. A fanner cotad
decide how much he wanted to pay for such a seed in the same way
that an air traveller chooses a ticket. In theory, you would get
what you paid for. Deploying genes in this way would essentially
turn something physical into something intellectual, and that,
Shapiro argues, is what the world today is all about. "The
historical model, the industrial-revolution model we live by now,
says that our quality of hfe has to do with possession of things,
of stuff," he told me one day as we talked in his office.
"But it turns out that information doesn't occupy a lot of
stuff and can create enormous value." As he spoke, he waved
his arms so energetically that he knocked the glasses from his
face. "Biotech is a subset of information technology. It's
a way of encoding information in nucleic acids as opposed to encoding
it in charged silicon. It's a way to create value without creating
more stuff. I put a gene, which is information, into a cottonseed,
and I do@t have to spray stuff on the crop in order to control
insects. That strategy strikes me as the right one for agriculture,
just as it strikes me as the right one for post-industrial society."
In May of 1998, Monsanto offered $1.9 bilhon for Delta and its
vast cottonseed business. The strategy made perfect sense for
a company aggressively pursuing every aspect of agricultural biotechnology,
and every way to protect its inventions. But the Terminator seed
also turned Monsanto, and its chairman, into even bigger targets.

People at Monsanto have never seemed to understand why the
company has been damaged so badly in the public relations war
over biotechnology when other companies, such as Novartis and
DuPont, have largely escaped the punishment. (They might have
asked Green"Of all e comp ' s' this busipeace. th anie in
ness,'Lord Melchett told me, "Monsanto is the most committed
to agricultural biotechnology. They are no worse than DuPont.
But DuPont can survive without genetically modified organisms,
and I don't think Monsanto can. So we have had an opportunity
with them that we did not have with anyone else.") The skittishness
was evident throughout the company headquarters, in a sprawling
complex in suburban St. Louis. Giant tunnels and perfectly trimmed
paths connect the buildings; the place has a grim feeling, like
a hospital. Although people were helpfid and frank, you could
see apprehension in their eyes. When I tried to bn'ng a camera
on a tour of an experimental greenhouse, permission was refused;
when I met with an allergy researcher to talk about his work in
genetics, he immediately mentioned poor morale, public rancor,
and layoffs. Shapiro was not in town. Although Monsanto headquuters
are in St. Louis, he lives in Chicago, with his second Vife and
their two children, who are two and four. Shapiro's advisers had
told him to stay out of the public eye, and he was difficult to
reach, unth one day an E-maH popped onto my computer screen telling
me that, "in view of the confiision" that had characterized
my attempts to see him, Shapiro wanted to make sure I knew how
to find him. From that day, Shapiro-who has a reputation for being
remot@became the most accessible person at Monsanto. He always
replied to mail on the day it was sent, often within minutes.
"As you can probably tell," he wrote in one message
to me, "I'm less busy than the media accounts mig ' ht have
you believe." Shapiro is one of Americ2Cs best-paid executives.
He earned nearly twenty mUlion dollars in 1998, and more the year
before. The three words I most often heard from employees and
friends to describe him were "cold," "brilliant,"
and "intimidating." He can be all those things. Still,
it would be hard to find a more unekely symbol of American agriculture-or
of corporate power. A thin, almost painfidly contemplative Jew
from the Upper West Side of Manhattan, Shapiro dresses in oversized
designer sweaters and baggy, rumpled pants; he wears a tie about
five times a year and appears to regret it each time. He seems
almost uncomfortable with his power and influence. Shapiro attended
the Hunter School and Horace Mann and then 'oined the second class
of students admitted directly to Harvard College as sophomores,
in 1956. "That was a mistake," he told me. "There
were twelve of us. And I was immediately intellectually over my
head, which is something that I couldn't quite admit to myself
or to anyone else. I was used to being in places where I couod
be a star, and Harvard is the big leagues and 1 didn't feel like
a star." Shapiro taught himself to play guitar and found
refiige in music. "I was doing folk stuff back in the days
when it was pretty cool to do,' he said, smiling at the memory.
"I was Eterally sitting in cafes and doing small shows all
around New England." (Shapiro has two older chudren, from
his first marriage, who took the music gene one step farther and
started Veruca Salt, which, until it disbanded two years ago,
was one of the Midwest's most successfid alternativerock bands.)
Shapiro displayed the type of political leanings one would expect
from a child of West End Avenue. He protested the war in Vietnam
and-like "the rest of my generation was not fond of chemical
companies or of giant companies in general. I wondered what had
brought an antiwar activist, who seems even now to have more in
common N6th Joni Mitchell than with John Mitchell, to the leadership
of a multinational corporation. "You mean when did I fall?"
he asked, laughing. After Harvard, Shapiro attended Columbia University
Law School and stayed on to teach there. He became interested
in urban problems and held jobs in the Johnson Administration,
including one as a special assistant to the Under-Secretary of
Transportation. He watched, first hand, as the Great Society faded
to deliver on its promise, and he began to sense that government
was not going to cure the world's itls. He returned to teaching
for a while, at Northeastern, and then at the University of Wisconsin,
before spending several years as general counsel at the General
Instrument Corporation, which his father ran. ln 1979, he moved
to the pharmaceutical company G. D. Searle, as its general counsel.
Shapiro, who loves games-he was for years obsessed with the japanese
board game Go-at first saw corporate hfe as a giant puzzle. "It
was the best game I'd ever seen," he told me. "It was
the most complicated game. It had so many moving parts and so
many different kinds of skills you had to have in order to make
it work. It took me a while to realize that this is not a game.
This is one of the realest things you get to do in life."
He learned that in 1982, when he became the head of the NutraSweet
operation at Searle. "One of the moments in my evolution
that I will always remember is after we had launched the product,
and I was feeeng really good because it seemed to be succeeding,"
he said. "It was the first business I'd ever been given a
chance to try to create, and it was working well. So I was feeeng
proud of myself. But then I began getting letters from kids and
from parents of kids, mostly diabetics, who had never before been
able to have something like KoolAid or jello. And I realized what
was going on. We were doing something important for people. It
wasn't just making a handheld calculator, as we had done in my
previous incarnation. This thing actually mattered. "That
did it for me," he confinued. "I mean, look, I am very
well compensated, and I fike that. It's nice to have some of the
perks that make Efe easier. It is even nice when you talk with
people that they probably laugh at your jokes more than you deserve
because of who you are. But the thing I never would have guessed
about this job is that it g' ves you a chance to make a difference
in the world. When you go home at night and you talk to your family
about what you're working on, it s t ke 'Gee, I designed a really
cool paper ctip today.'It's about the earth, it's about the environment,
it's about food. It's about health and nutrition. Those are deep,
ancient things for civifization, and they are for the people."

At that point, Shapiro stopped talking, because he was fighting
back tears. lt was our first meeting, and I wondered if this reserved
and powerfiil corporate leader was acting. After a few moments,
he apologized. "You asked me before how this makes me feel,"
he said, referring to the very personal opposition that he and
Monsanto face almost every day. "There are two things that
most of us feel. We feel hurt, and we feel angry." Later,
he added to that: "We were really proud to get out front
the way we did@ with biotechnology. "In retrospect, it seems
incredibly nodve, but it's the truth. We had real leadership;
we had worked hard to do it. We had shown faith in this science
when others were dubious, and it all seemed to be working. So
we painted a big bull's-eye on our chest, and we went over the
top of the hill."

In 1997, not long after Roundup Ready canola began to be planted
widely, a farmer in Canada reported that some seeds had "escaped"
and cross-pollinated vath a related species of weeds which was
growing on the edge of his fields. DNA testing proved him right,
and geneticauy modified agriculture had produced its own public
aberration: a hybrid "super-weed" that included the
genes engineered specifically to make a plant resistant to herbicides.
If resistant crops managed to cross with nearby weeds, then herbicides-like
Roundup-would become useless. This kind of pollution did not start
with modified seeds, and it is not likely to become a threat in
the developed

world, because most major crops have few relatives nearby.
Yet the possibility that modified genes can "escape"
and cross with neighbors in the fields has led to much discussion
about the risks of moving DNA between species. The basic genetic
structures of most species, even of species as apparently remote
from each other as humans and, say, lettuce, have far more similarities
than differences. Yet, when you move DNA from one species to another,
there is always a possibility that the new combination will act
unpredictably. "I'm not going to tell you that an aben wave
of superweeds will take over the planet," Rebecca J. Goldburg,
a senior scientist at the activist organization Environmental
Defense, told me. "I'm not going to tell you we ca t address
the problem. But we don't really know what the problem is. And
we are moving ahead so rapidly in thousands of ways with so many
genes and so many products. And I do worry how you can accurately
balance the risks, because we don't have the right information.

With the tremendous rush to market genetically modified seeds-nearly
two billion dollars' worth were sold last yeai-many biologists
worry that there still isn't enough known about transgenic crops.
Many varieties of corn, tomatoes, soybean, and squash have been
approved for unlimited use, and by some estimates there are now
thought to be thirty thousand products made from modified crops.
Anyone who has dipped sushi in soy sauce, eaten bread, pasta,
ice cream, candy, or processed meats (not to mention cornflakes)
has almost certainly consumed genetically modified food. And the
speed with which the products have entered our lives concerns
many people. "So confident are the technicians of the safety
of their products that each one is seen as no more than an arbitrary
mix of independent lengths of DNA," the popular British geneticist
Steve Jones writes. "Their view takes no account of the notion
of species as interacting groups of genes, the properties of one
... depending upon the others with which it is placed." Virus-resistant
crops, for example, contain viral genes in all their cells. But
viruses can introduce genetic material to their host cells, which
means that these crops may, in theory, be able to create new diseases
rather than defend against them. Jones and other scientists argue
that the genetic engineering of seeds ignores a basic fact of
evolution: the action of a gene or any protein-can depend on the
species in which it is located. The most vivid example of that
involved research by the seed company Pioneer HiBred, where, in
1995, scientists placed genes from a Brazil nut into a soybean,
to help increase levels of the amino acids methionine and cysteine,
which made the beans more nutritious for animal feed. The plan
worked, but there was an unforeseen demonstration of what can
happen in the food chain when just a few molecules of DNA are
altered: many people are allergic to Brazil nuts. If one of these
people were to eat a cake made with soy that contained the Brazil-nut
protein, the results could be deadly. In this case, science succeeded.

The Brazil-nut soybean was never eaten. Pioneer took blood
from nine people in a laboratory, and stopped the experiments
when the serum tested positive. Still, with such research occurring
in countries that have weak regulatory ' 'lar mistakes could have
systems, simi 1 powerful consequences. Shapiro understands the
concern. "When you start talking about largescale introduction
of dramatic traits in combination with each other, you are deahng
vn'th systems that are so comphcated that no one can effectively
model them," he said. "You can start with running field
trials, just as when you introduce a new drug you run cenical
trials to see if people really keel over. But, just as the human
body is a subtle and comphcated thing, it may be that only one
time in a mileon some side effect happens. And your testing won't
reveal that. It has to be out there first. So what you have to
keep asking yourself is: 'Suppose the worst happens, what are
the consequences?"' Many in the environmental movement have
demanded that the "precautionary principle" be applied
with special vigor to genetically modified foods, argulng that
potential n'sks, no matter how remote, must be given more weight
than any possi 'ble benefit, no matter how great. "lt's the
only safe way," Lord Melchett told me recently at the Greenpeace
headquarters, in North London. "Because with all this stuff
you are just dealing in speculation upon speculation. Hope upon
whim. They talk about these great discoveries. But what do we
really have?" The precautionary principle, when interpreted
this way, would make it difficult to answer such a question, because
it would prohibit investigation unless the outcome was known in
advance. But the most striking recent example of the precautionary
principle involves the case of John E. Losey, an assistant professor
of entomology at Cornell Univarsity, and his research on the monarch
butterfly. Last year, the British science journal Nature published
a short letter by Losey and two of his colleagues about the effects
that Bt in a genetically modified type of corn had on the larvae
of monarch butterfiies. Bt is found commonly in soya, and it produces
a toxin that can destroy the digestive tracts of worms and other
pests but is harmless to mammals. Organic farmers use Bt spray
liberally. Rachel Carson wrote supportively about it in "Silent
Spring," and Lord Melchett told me that he has used it on
his farm (he has also used Monsanto's Roundup). Bt spray, however,
is chemically fragile and easily broken down by sunlight or washed
away in the rain. So scientists decided to put it directly into
plants; that way, plants create their own insecticides. Losey
examined how monarchs responded, in a laboratory, to Bt corn pollen,
and in his study asserted that three-day-old monarch larvae that
had been reared in a laboratory on milkweed leaves dusted with
Bt pollen had a mortality rate of forty-four per cent. Nature
rejected an article on Losey's study, but agreed to print a short
"scientific correspondence" about his work. It was an
instant sensation. The study was seized upon as 11 proof"
that genetically modified organisms are deadly; one newspaper
wrote, for example, about "butterflies bearing grenades."
"It's the smoking " ' PeterRoderickwhoonbehalf gun,
said of the Friends of the Earth brought some of the first lawsuits
in England against genetic modification. "What more needs
to be said?" But a laboratory is not an open meadow, which
is wher monarchs like to lay their eggs, and several studies have
shown that the pollen diminishes rapidly within three metres of
the cornfield's edge, and that corn pollination is usually complete
before monarchs be 'n feeding.

"How many monarchs get killed on the windshield of a car?"
asked ALnthony M. Shelton, who is a professor of entomology at
Cornell, and a colleague of Losey's. Shelton has long urged that
farmers build a "natural" refiige, a sort of moat containing
traditional crops, or crops without Bt genes, around a geneticaUy
modified field. That would insure genetic diversity: insects that
become resistant to the insecticide for modified crops would mate
with neilrhbors livinly on traditional plants nearby, and their
offspring would then be susceptible to the insecticides. The monarch
study has made for some touchy personal relationships .

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Losey, a shy but self-possessed man in his midthirties, has
been put in an awkward position; bickering with tenured members
of one's department has never been a fast track to success. But
he isn't in retreat, either. "I think it is easy to sit back
and say we would have known this," he told me. "But
the study was not done before, and now we need to look at what
it means. I take no side. 1 am supposed to look coldly and objectively
at any pestmanagement tactic and assess its risks and benefits.
When we did this paper, there was one other lab working on this
issue. Now there are a dozen. That's the way it should be."
Because science and politics have become so entangled, it has
been hard to pick rationally through the facts. The monarch-butterfly
letter-or "killer cor@' study, as it was often called-was
released in the middle of the lengthy storm over the Terminator
gene. The two were often lumped together. With the Terminator,
Monsanto finally decided it couldn't win. ln June, a few months
before the Greenpeace conference, Gordon Conway, who is an agricultural
ecologist and the head of the RockefeUer Foundation, publicly
urged Monsanto to abandon the gene. Conway is a committed advocate
of agricultural biotechnology, but he had decl 'ded that the gene
carried with it too much dangerous social baggage. So even though
Monsanto did not yet own the company that holds the patent (and
never would: at the end of 1999, Monsanto withdrew its proposal
to purchase the Delta & Pine Land Company, after an antitrust
inquiry by the Justice Department), and even though the technology
does not yet exist, and nobody can say for sure whether it would
even work, or when, Shapiro announced that Monsanto would not
pursue, develop, or ever use the Terminator. lt was among the
first times in the history of science that such a prominent discovery
was disavowed years before it was even clear what its value might
be.

Late last fall, I asked Lord Melchett if Lhe thought that Monsanto
had hit bottom. "No, it has@t, actually," he said, confidently.
"Not by a long shot." As the Dow rose in the last two
years, Monsanto's stock fell from a high of sixty-three dollars
to thirty-five dollars at the end of December. (Last week, it
had recovered, to fifty.) Just before Christmas, Monsanto even
became something of an international joke, when the companys caterr-r
in ' London announced wi'th great fanfare that, for the safety
of the employees, it had banned genetically modified food from
the cafeteria at Monsanto's U.K. headquarters. Shapiro's vision
of a unified "Efe sciences" company that rehed on biotechnology
to create foods and drugs began to fade. Consolidation has become
routine in both the agn'cldture and the pharmaceutical industries,
and after more than a year of speculation that the company would
break into pieces-and after many merger discussions with competitors-Monsanto
announced, on December 19th, that it would join with Pharmacia
& Upjohn. By the end of 1999, the company was worth less than
twenty-five billion dollars-not much more than what most analysts
say its pharmaceutical division, Searle, which Monsanto bought
in 1985, would be worth by itself. (In 1998, Monsanto almost completed
a merger vath American Home Products, a deal that would have valued
it at more than thirty-four billion dollars.) At the same time,
Monsanto's Celebrex, a painkiller for arthritis that may also
play a role in cancer prevention, had just become the most profitable
new drug in American history, earning more than a billon dollars
in its first year on the market, and Monsanto herbicides were
selling better than ever. One of the many organizations that oppose
Monsanto (the Internet is fined with web sites like "MonsantoSucks"
and references to "MonSata@') quickly described the merger
with Pharmacia as Pharmageddon for Monsanto. "The reason
there is controversy about this has nothing to do with biotechnology,"
Shapiro told me last fall. "This is about power. It's about
them saying that if you want to make changes in people's lives
or introduce new technology, you ... are going to have to go through
us. And if we don't approve, we are going to bring You down."

If you drive out of Naples for more than ten miles, on any
road and in any direction, you will roll past fields of fenaiel,
apricots, lettuce, onions, artichokes, cabbage, olive trees, and
tomatoes. Especially tomatoes. This region is home to several
of the world's most prized varieties, and among them one stands
out: the plum-shaped San Marzano. According to Neapolitan tradition,
pizza was invented as a vehicle for the consumption of the San
Marzano. Ash from the eruption of Mt. Vesuvius created a soil
rich in potassium and other minerals which is not found anywhere
else on earth. Like wine from Bordeaux or the tobacco in Cuban
cigars, tomatoes grown there have a special taste. Eduardo Angelo
Ruggiero's family has grown tomatoes outside Naples since 1919.
Ruggiero is a sweet-tempered forty-two-year-old man vlq'th short,
dark hair and wire-rimmed glasses. He has three children who plan
to grow tomatoes, too. They will have to do it somewhere else,
though, because Ru 'ero's 991 farm no longer operates here. "The
last ten years have been disastrous," he told me one day
when I went to tour the barren fields vith him. "ln the eighties,
this was the No. 1 tomato-producing region in Italy. Now it is
No. 4 or 5." That's because a mosaic virus-a simple, common,
but devastating disease-has taken over the fields. The infected
plants become tall, stringy, and thin, making it hard for them
to soak up water and impossible to protect the fruit from sun.
"The tomato was born here," Rugglero told me. "Now
I think it's dying here. We understand that genetics could help,
but the question is poetical. I myself have mixed feelings. 1
am afraid that if we grow tomatoes differently they will taste
like every other tomato in the world. But there is also a truth.
We have lost ninety per cent of our production in the past decade."
Ruggiero and others in the region sought from the government funding
for genetically altered seeds, and researchers say it should be
easy to create a plant that could withstand the virus. In Italy,
however, as in most of Europe, there are regulations against such
intervention. "TV every day is telling us the products are
dangerous," he said, "and are being dumped on Europe
against our will." Not every country has had this experience.
In Kenya, the national Agricultural Research Institute, with considerable
help from Monsanto, has created a sweet potato that is protected
against similar viral attacks. Sweet potatoes are an important
food in Africa: they contain more calories and a greater array
of micronutrients than any other crop. By inserting in the sweet
potato viral proteins from the outer coat of the sweetpotato feathery-mottle
virus, the researchers appear to have conferred immunity from
a number of other common viruses as well. In Mexico, a similar
approach has been used. ln this case, Monsanto donated the genes
to the Mexicans, but only after they agreed to insert them solely
in varieties of potato used in Mexico. ln Italy, however, seed
companies must present a certificate to farmers'cooperatives stating
that their products have not been genetically modified. At harvest
time, farmers are required to do that, too. Then food processors,
distri 'butors, and, eventually, supermarket chains all have to
provide signed affidavits showing that their products are, as
the ltallans say, "biological," because, Rugglero told
me, people there refuse to tinker with nature. But tinkering with
nature is what farmers do, and so in thinking about genetically
modified crops one runs into a crucial question: Is a plant perfectly
natural if its genes are formed in a combination that has been
arrived at over generations of breeding but polluted and dangerous
if those same genes-the identical little snippets of DNA-are shot
into the plant walls with a tungstencoated gene gun? "This
just drives me insane" Susan McCouch, a rice specialist who
also teaches at Cornell, told me. "lf you look even briefly
at the history of plant breeding, then you know that every crop
we eat today is genetically modified. Every one. Human beings
have imposed selection on them aH. So don't ask me what is natural
and what is not. Because I have no idea."

f genetically modified crops are to fidfill their promise,
they wiu have to do it in the Third World. Developments that Europeans
dismiss as a joke matter deeply there. (The delayed-ripening tomato,
initially marketed by Calgene, a company now owned by Monsanto,
is a perfect example. To take genes that control ripening in fruit
and slow them down may mean little in countries where produce
is plen@, refrigeration is cheap, and the roads are always open,
but in Africa and Asia up to forty per cent of all vegetables
rot in the field or are lost to pests.) Still, none of these advances
are likely without large increases of public funding for farmers.
"There is not enough incentive," Gordon Conway, of the
Rockefeller Foundation, told me. He has been sinoarly effective
in arguing that biotechnology must play a critical role in raising
the level of prosperity in the developing world. "You have
these two 91ants locked in a horrible battle," he said. "The
fight may hurt Monsanto, and it may hurt Greenpeace. But the real
casualties are going to be truth and the poor." The need
for new solutions to feeding the world is almost the only issue
on which both sides seem to agree. New methods of farming, particularly
the use of chemical fertilizers and herbicides, helped to more
than double world food production over the past forty years. The
number of hungry people fell drastically, despite a huge population
increase. But this success came at the cost of tremendous erosion
and loss of arable land. In addition, rapid urbanization has put
new pressures on water resources; since the eighties, there has
been a dechne in the growth of crops-per-acre in most of Asia
and Africa. Yet, according to a projection released last October
by the Inli ternational Food Po cy Research Institute, the world
demand for rice, wheat, and maize wiu increase forty per cent
by the year 2020. If the politics of g,-neticauy modified food
has never been so anguished, the scientific prospects have never
seemed more promising. Charles Arntzen and colleagues at Cornell's
Boyce Thompson Institute for Plant Research, for example, are
tantalizingly close to develop ing a vaccine for hepatitis B and
one for diarrhea that could be incorporated into the cells of
a banana. The benefits wotdd be enormous, particularly in places
where refrigerators, sterile needles, and hygiene are always in
short supply. Bananas can be grown in the countries that need
them. They are cheap, simple to distribute, and babies can eat
them as easily as adults. Arntzen told me that it wifl soon be
possible to grow enough bananas on a single four-acre plot to
protect a mid-size African country-his example was Ugand@from
hepatitis B. The most important recent development involves the
world's most important crop: rice. At least a third of the world's
popwation depends on rice, but it is a poor source of vitamins.
According to UNICEF, more than a hundred million children suffer
from Vitamin A deficiency; millions lose their eyesight as a result,
and at least two million die each year from related infections.
But in janscary a team led by Ingo Potrykus, of the Swiss Federal
Institute of Technology, in Zurich, and Peter Beyer, of the University
of Freiburg, in Germany, published a report showing how they had
introduced into the rice plant three genes that complete the genetic
pathway needed to produce beta-carotene-which is then broken down
into Vitamin A. The result has been called Golden Rice, because
of its color (beta-carotene turns the rice yellow), and also because
of what it can accomplish. "When you can eat Vitamin A in
your rice," Arntzen told me, "this one accomplishment
of genetic engineering could alleviate more suffering and illness
than any single medicine has done in the history of the world."
The gap between scientists and humanists has narrowed in the last
fifty years, but it would be fooesh to pretend that it has disappeared
entirely. When I told Lord Melchett that I wanted, really, to
write about the science of genetic modification, he was appalled.
"If you write something, it shouldn't be about the science,"
he told me. "You'd be missing the point. People do things
for all sorts of reasons that are rafional, but they are not scientific
or technical. Why does somebody buy a Rolls-Royce or a Mercedes?
It's a box with four wheels. But nobody says you are completely
irrational to buy an expensive car. If it's acceptable to choose
your car based on emotion and not science, why should it be wrong
to choose your food that way. " I didn't ask him if he really
thought it was acceptable to buy a Rolls. But I understood his
fear. When frozen food was introduced, in the nineteen-twenties,
people who were concerned about the effects of keeping food in
a freezer for weeks or longer tried to ban it. GeneticaUy modified
products are new enough so that similar fears are easy to understand.
The comparison that Greenpeace and many other opponents Eke to
make is to nuclear power-a technology that seems to be in eclipse,
despite having fundamentally changed the world. When it comes
to promise, and potential peril, the pharmaceutical industry itself
provides a better analogy: the development of antibiotics and
vaccines has helped double life expectancy in most countries in
the last century. PenicilEn alone has saved millions of lives.
But every technology has n'sks and benefits, and the same is true
for food and drugs. People die from eating peanuts and shellfish
every day. Allergies to penicluin still kill a few people every
year in the United States, and aspirin causes a wide range of
serious illnesses, and even many deaths. Politics, not science,
is now guiding the discussion about genetically modified products,
and that makes people Eke Gordon Conway impatient. When we discussed
the zealous way the precautionary principle is currently being
applied, for example, he said, "There could be no benefits
for anybody, because it could never be proved in advance that
there woldd be no risk. I can think of no better definition for
the word'Luddite."'

n an overcast day at the end of OMarch, Monsanto stockholders
gathered in Skokie, Illinois, to vote on the merger with Pharmacia.
Shapiro told me before the meeting that he diddt know what to
expect: protests were possible and security was tight. Yet there
was@t one placard in sight, and only about a hundred and fifty
people turned up for the meeting, which was held at the North
Shore Center for the Performing Arts, a high-tech concert venue
surrounded by a string of malls. Most of those present were retirees
from Searle, which is just down the road. Shapiro appeared on
the stage in casual slacks, a blue cotton shirt, and no tie. The
Monsanto motto, "Food, Health, Hope," was projected
on a screen behind him. He whipped through the proceedings in
nine minutes. He talked about "convertible perpetual preferred
stock," and requirements to change the company name to the
Pharmacia Corporation. The vote that ended the era of Monsanto
as an independent company was approved, as one shareholder noted,
"in less time than it's going to take me to find my car keys."
Shapiro thanked everyone and pointed out that "this is a
momentous day in the history of our company. Afterward, I asked
Shapiro if he felt at all wistful. He smiled bleakly. "You
always feel that way when you change something special,"
he said. "It doesdt mean it's bad or wrong. It's just new."
The Monsanto name will now remain attached solely to the agricultural
part of the business, which may eventually be sold, so that the
new company can focus on pharmaceuticals. Shapiro

wiU rehnqw'sh the title of chief executive in the new Pharmacia
Corporation, staying on for the next eighteen months as non-executive
chairman, a job in which he wiu work mostly to smooth the merger
with the board. When that chore is finished, Shapiro's career
at Monsanto win be over. "You know, Bob Shapiro is probably
the greatest visionary we have in American agricLAture,"
Charles Arntzen told me. "But it's never easy being that
far ahead of the pack. I've spent a lot of time in Texas in my
Efe, and they have this expression there for a guy who is out
on a limb; they say he's a n'dge rider. And Bob Shapiro has been
riding that ridge for a really long time. Sometimes those people
get where they are going, but usually not. Usually, they get picked
off."

After one of our final conversations, Al realized that, for
all I knew, Bob Shapiro, a native of the Upper West Side and a
specialist in urban life, wouldn't know which end of a shovel
to plant in the earth. I assumed that to him this great game with
seeds and chemicals was just that-a fantastic abstraction, like
Go. So I sent him a note, asking if, as the head of one of Amen'ca's
big_zest seed companies, he had ever planted a garden. It was
a late winter Sunday, but he replied at once. "Oddly enough,
as I signed on to get my E-mail today I was (and am) surrounded
by catalogs from White Flower Farm, Wayside Gardens, Shepherd's
Seeds and Johnny's Selected Seeds," he said. "As soon
as I finish my E-mail, I'm going on the web to place my spring
orders. My father was an avid gardener, and so am 1. We have a
place in Michigan where I grow mostly flowering perennials, but
also vegetables, fruit and berries. I love growing stuff, I love
making compost-it all seems miraculous to me. It's also a rich
source of metaphors for everything important in life." +